The Real Adventure eBook

But this was only the beginning of Rose’s troubles
to-day. She was paying the price of yesterday’s
exaltation and her spirits had sunk down to nowhere.
What a fool’s paradise yesterday had been with
its vision of her big self-sufficient husband coming
to her for mothering because he had lost a law-suit!
What a piece of mordant irony it was, that she should
have found herself, after all her silly hopes, sobbing
in his arms, while he comforted her for her bitter
disappointment over not being able to comfort him!
She had told the truth when she said he was the one,
really, who didn’t know how funny it was.

Well, and wasn’t her other effort just as ridiculous?
If ever he found her heap of law-books and learned
of the wretched hours she had spent trying to discover
what they were all about in the hope of promoting
herself to a true intellectual companionship with him,
wouldn’t he take the discovery in exactly the
same way—­be touched by the childish futility
of it and yet amused at the same time—­cuddle
her indulgently in his arms and soothe her disappointment;—­and
then urge her to look at the funny side of it?
He must know hundreds of practising lawyers. Were
there a dozen out of them all whose minds had the power
to stimulate and bring into action the full powers
of his own?

Well then, what was the use of trying? If James
Randolph was right—­and it seemed absurd
to question it—­she had just one charm for
her husband—­the charm of sex. To that
she owed her hours of simulated companionship with
him, his tenderness for her, his willingness to make
her pleasures his own. To that she owed the extravagantly
pretty clothes he was always urging her to buy—­the
house he kept her in—­the servants he paid
to wait on her. Well then, why not make the best
of it?

Only, if she went on much longer, feeling sick and
faded like this, she’d have nothing left to
make the most of, and then where would she be?

Oh, she was getting maudlin, and she knew it!
And when she got over feeling so weak and giddy, she’d
brace up and be herself again. But for the present,
she didn’t feel like seeing Portia.

But Rose’s shrinking from a talk with Portia
that morning was a mild feeling compared with Portia’s
dread of the impending talk with Rose. Twice
she had walked by the perfect doorway of the McCrea
house before she entered it; ostensibly to give herself
a little more time to think—­really, because
she shrank from the ordeal that awaited her in there.

Her sister’s menage had been a source of irritation
to Portia ever since it was established, though a
deeper irritation was her own with herself for allowing
it to affect her thus. Rose’s whole-hearted
plunge into the frivolities of a social season, her
outspoken delight in it, her finding in it, apparently,
a completely satisfactory solution to the problem of
existence, couldn’t fail to arouse Portia’s
ironic smile. This was the sort of vessel her
mother had freighted with her hopes! This was
the course she steered.